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be published in
Inventor’s Digest
or something. Luckily, I didn’t think it would be any more successful than the rest of Dad’s inventions, so I didn’t have much to worry about.
    Finally, the mixture for the test was cooled, and Dad was ready to try it out. By that time, it had cooled into a somewhat more solid mixture, like blue clay. It looked sort of like how I imagined plastic explosives to look, and I guess that’s what it was, in a way.
    “Keep the notebook ready,” he said. “Write down everything that happens in the test. The real key is going to be absolute precision in the amount of mixture used per match.”
    He picked up a plain little stick of wood, on which there was a tiny metal device of some sort, and put it on a digital scale. I wrote down its weight. Then, using some piece of goofy gear that looked about like a turkey baster, he added a drop of the blue stuff to the end, covering the metal device, and then held it for a moment, waiting for it to dry. Once it seemed solid, he put it on the scale again and had me write down the new weight.
    “Now,” he said, “when I subtract the first measurement from the second one, I’ll know exactly how much of the material is on the match.”
    “Makes sense,” I said. “Are you going to test it?”
    He smiled, held up the match with one hand, and snapped his fingers with the other one.
    I looked at the match and was not at all surprised when nothing happened.
    Dad, however, frowned, and snapped harder. That time, there was a tiny spark, but nothing caught fire.
    “I guess it’s not so flammable that it’s dangerous,” I said.
    Dad just stared for a second. “Damn,” he said.
    “Time to try a new mixture?”
    Dad just sat there, looking bummed out.
    “Well,” he said, finally, “I know what I’d do if I were Thomas Edison.”
    “What?”
    “I’d hire somebody to invent it for me and then take all the credit. That’s what he did with the lightbulb, film projectors, and everything else he ever made. I’m just lucky he’s too dead to steal this one from me.”
    Then he had me help him clean the place up.
    As much as I disliked all the invention junk, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the poor guy. I thought about how long it might take him to get the mixture to do what he wanted at this rate, which was a very, very long time. The thought of him spending most of his life in the garage trying to make something that, if it worked, couldn’t possibly be safe enough to sell in stores was just plain sad.

Tuesday seemed like it would be a good day in school. Not only did I have the advanced studies thing in the morning, but instead of being in class the last forty-five minutes of the day, I had the first weekly gifted-pool meeting, where we’d all meet with Mrs. Smollet in the special classroom that had couches and stuff. Going there didn’t do a whole lot to make you popular among other kids, but all you had to say was that you just went because it got you out of class and nobody really held it against you. Also, most of the kids in school knew that half of the people there were, as I have said, a bunch of troublemakers, and it was rumored that Mrs. Smollet tried to have us all expelled pretty regularly.
    I almost didn’t blame her; we did our best to make life difficult for her, though she didn’t always notice. When she had us do a thing in seventh grade where we were supposed to bring in our favorite poem, we all tried to outdo each other finding the worst poem imaginable, and she didn’t quite catch on. She said that the one James read about how “it takes a heap o’ livin’ to make a house a home” brought tears to her eyes. And not because it sucked. And that was one of our minor stunts; the best reactions usually came when we pretended to be devil worshippers.
    Tuesday was also the day I was going over to Anna’s house, which made it doubly exciting. In the morning I took a shower about twice as long as the ones I normally